>>It matters if you have money, time, and willpower to go to court.
This is why we need some version of Loser Pays law... Especially when there is a huge resource imbalance like a FB suing a lone dev.
How to deal with receiving a cease-and-desist letter from Big Tech
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Re: How to deal with receiving a cease-and-desist letter from Big Tech
#22How would something like this go with an open source project? Other people could have forked it already, so taking everything down is impossible.
You are not responsible for what other people do, only what you do. If you feel the need to comply with a C&D by, for instance, taking down your work, you take down the repositories you are in control of and don't worry about others who forked the work. Worrying about them is the complaining company's job.
Re: How to deal with receiving a cease-and-desist letter from Big Tech
#23How would something like this go with an open source project? Other people could have forked it already, so taking everything down is impossible.
I am completely unclear on whether publishing your project open source gives it (at least, the code, if not any deployed version) any kind of protection if Facebook etc. target it
I would love to get a lawyer's take on that, although I guess it would differ by jurisdiction - California and Ireland are probably the two key ones for most big tech
Re: How to deal with receiving a cease-and-desist letter from Big Tech
#24Very good post, also kind of depressing how big companies can easily squash the little guys
> It doesn’t matter if you’re right. It matters if you have money, time, and willpower to go to court
There are some exceptions to this, but for probably 99% of cases, this is true
I’ve personally been on the receiving end of a litigious situation, facing a very wealthy individual. It did not go well for me, and had to swallow my pride/ego. This last bit might be the hardest thing to do
It is one thing to rationally know that the world is not fair. But when it happens to you, oh man, it’s not easy at all to take it
Re: How to deal with receiving a cease-and-desist letter from Big Tech
#25We (and our new clients) constantly get frivolous cease and desist notices from a particularly butthurt competitor whenever they lose one of their customers to us. They have a habit of shutting off customer access to their systems and ignoring any requests from customers (who are still paying their bills) for their data.
Re: How to deal with receiving a cease-and-desist letter from Big Tech
#26thanks for this, it was a great read
Thanks brother. By which I mean, you are literally my brother
Re: How to deal with receiving a cease-and-desist letter from Big Tech
#27Given the acknowledgement that cease-and-desist letters from Big Tech may be for the purpose of bullying, false, and fully unenforceable, I'm disappointed that the possibility of referring the sender to 'Arkell v. Pressdram' [0] didn't even get mentioned. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Eye#Libel_cases
Love it - will add a section with more innovative approaches like this
e.g. was just chatting with a fellow cease-and-desist receiver, Mohammed Shah, who finds comfort in using a different misspelling for the name of the lawyer harassing him, every time he replies
Great for morale
Re: How to deal with receiving a cease-and-desist letter from Big Tech
#28easy, there is a convenient device called a trashcan this is where such letters go
Remember, though, that in many places ignoring something can put you at risk for a default judgement at a later date. It'd be nice if we could just ignore troll trash :/
Re: How to deal with receiving a cease-and-desist letter from Big Tech
#29This is a great writeup. I am not a lawyer, but I've received several C&Ds for various things over the decades. The first one scared me to death. The second and subsequent ones did not, because I understood what they were: just the company saying "I don't like what you're doing". When I receive a C&D, the first thing I do is talk to my attorney and go over what the C&D is complaining about. If I think I'm doing somet…
What's the proper course of action if you don't have an attorney?
Re: How to deal with receiving a cease-and-desist letter from Big Tech
#30This is a great writeup. I am not a lawyer, but I've received several C&Ds for various things over the decades. The first one scared me to death. The second and subsequent ones did not, because I understood what they were: just the company saying "I don't like what you're doing". When I receive a C&D, the first thing I do is talk to my attorney and go over what the C&D is complaining about. If I think I'm doing somet…
What's the proper course of action if you don't have an attorney?
If you eat the stationary that the C&D is printed on, it's like it never existed (IANAL).